This study aimed to explore the role of inference making in the relation between vocabulary knowledge (breadth and depth) and reading comprehension for 487 ninthgrade Chinese EFL students who were categorized as either struggling or adequate. Path analysis was used to examine both direct and mediated effects. The results indicated a statistically significant indirect effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension, mediated by inference making, for the entire participant group. However, there were notable differences between the struggling and adequate readers, as evidenced by distinct path diagrams. For struggling readers, the indirect effect of vocabulary breadth on reading comprehension through inference making was significant, while that of vocabulary depth was not significant. For adequate readers, both vocabulary breadth and depth directly explained reading comprehension. These results are discussed in the EFL context, encompassing assessment and instructional implications for EFL readers with varying levels of reading abilities.

본 연구는 M여자중학교와 U중학교의 2학년 학생들에게 올바른 일상 언어생활을 위하여 한자학습이 필요하다는 것을 느끼게 해주고, 또, 일상 언어생활의 한자어휘로 두 학교 학생들에게 창의적 사고역량, 지식정보처리역량을 길러주고자 하는데 있다. 연구자는 먼저 신문, 방송, 가요, 교과서에서 한자어휘를 찾아서 직접 읽고 쓰거나 조어기법으로 한자어휘 만드는 것을 통하여 한자학습의 필요성을 느끼게 하였고, 둘째, 일상 언어 생활의 한자어휘를 가지고 새로운 한자어휘들을 만들어내는 브레인스토밍, 임의의 3개의 한자어휘를 활용하여 글쓰기를 하는 강제결합법, 8개의 한자어휘를 활용하여 글쓰기를 하는 연꽃기법, 한글 노래가사를 한자 노래가사로 바꾸는 스캠퍼기법, 한자어휘 끝말잇기를 하는 통제연상법을 통하여 창의적 사고 역량을 길러주고자 하였고, 셋째, 휴대폰 어플 웹툰캐, 워드클라우드, 오토랩, 싱플레이, 플리파클립 을 활용하여 지식정보처리역량을 길러주고자 하였다. 창의적 사고역량 개발 측면에서는 M여자중학교가 다소 유의미한 결과가 있었지만 U중학교는 그렇지 못했다. 그런데 지식정보처리역량 개발 측면에서는 U중학교가 다소 유의미한 결과가 있었지만, M여자중학교는 그렇지 못했다. 또, 수업만족도와 한자학습의 필요성 측면에서는 M여자중학교가 다소 유의미한 결과가 있었지만 U중학교는 그렇지 못했다.

Lexical richness makes an important contribution to L2 writing quality. To explore its importance, the study aims to identify and explain how lexical richness manifests in argumentative essays written in the final exam of reading and writing class by thirty-five undergraduates. The lexical richness consists of four interrelated elements: lexical diversity, density, sophistication, and fluency. Detailed text analysis can identify these elements in EFL students' academic writing. The correlation analysis showed that the use of lexical diversity, sophistication, and fluency all affect writing quality and can be seen differently in a text depending on different score ranges, vocabulary knowledge and linguistic performance. Further, the regression analysis revealed that the lexical sophistication was found to be the most significant predictor that contributes to writing quality. In sum, the lexical richness displayed in written text is a result of a person’s underlying vocabulary knowledge. This study ends with a pedagogical implication for teaching lexical richness in EFL academic coursework.

Despite the recognized importance of morphological knowledge to literacy outcomes such as vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, two of its subconstructs— morphological awareness and morphological processing—have received comparatively little attention. In response, the aim of the study reported here was to examine how the relationships between morphological awareness and morphological processing, especially in terms of morphological transparency and morphological frequency, contribute to the vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension of 62 native Korean-speaking secondary school students—27 eighth-graders and 35 tenth-graders— learning English as a foreign language. The students’ performance on the Test of Morphological Structure and the Word Reading Test was assessed to gauge their compounding awareness, inflectional awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. The results indicated that the students’ performance was varied depending on morphological transparency and frequency. In addition, it was not morphological processing, but rather morphological awareness that explained variances in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, when compounding awareness and inflectional awareness were controlled for. This paper discusses what such findings imply for teaching English as a foreign language to Korean learners.

The present study aims to investigate the direct and indirect contributions of Korean EFL college students’ L2 receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge to their L2 writing performances by using a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis with a goal to explore the pathways of vocabulary knowledge to writing. Data from 178 students were collected through tests of receptive and productive vocabulary breadth and depth, a writing test and a reading test. In testing a hypothesized model on the roles of receptive and productive vocabulary in writing, the results of the SEM analysis reveal the direct role of productive vocabulary in writing. The indirect role of receptive vocabulary on writing was observed through the mediating role of productive vocabulary or reading ability due to the direct contribution of receptive vocabulary to both productive vocabulary and reading and that of productive vocabulary and reading to writing. Findings from the study shed light on the relations of L2 receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge with L2 writing abilities, suggesting potential benefits of both receptive and productive vocabulary learning for L2 writing.

This study examined the effectiveness of integrated language instruction using dictogloss on vocabulary knowledge and retention. Forty EFL students from two classes of an elementary school participated in the study. The integrated language class and segregated language class were examined by looking into the effect of each instructional type on the vocabulary knowledge development and retention. A total of 10 target words were selected from a storybook related to their textbook. Four types of vocabulary knowledge were measured: passive recognition, passive recall, active recognition, and active recall. The pretest and posttest were performed to measure the vocabulary growth. The retention rate of each instruction was examined by conducting a delayed posttest on the same words after two weeks. The results of this study indicate that integrated language instruction using dictogloss works better in vocabulary retention. They also suggest that further classroom research is required to prove that dictogloss is an effective way for vocabulary learning.

The present study investigated which facets of perceived self-efficacy (PSE) in L2 reading are significantly related to L2 reading proficiency (L2RP), which type of linguistic knowledge feeds into PSE, and how they are related to L2RP when considered together. Participants (n = 95) were college students from two universities in Seoul. Four subcomponents of PSE were identified for investigation: text-based PSE, general PSE, PSE in linguistic knowledge, and PSE in authentic reading. The result of stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that the general PSE whose items reflect dimensions of social comparative influences and perceived controllability over environments was the only significant predictor of L2RP (R2 = 17.7%). For the relationships between linguistic knowledge and PSE, vocabulary knowledge (VK) was shown to be the only significant predictor of PSE when considered together with grammar knowledge (GK) and L2RP (R2 = 22.9%), while VK and GK were significant predictors of L2RP (R2 = 69.4%). PSE was not found to make an independent contribution to L2RP when considered with linguistic knowledge.

The present study examines L2 reading proficiency effects on the relative contribution of vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge to L2 reading comprehension for Korean high school EFL learners. To this end, 200 high school students were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge test, a grammar test, and a reading comprehension test. The participants were divided into three sub-groups by L2 reading ability in order to examine L2 proficiency effects. Multiple regression analyses for the sub-groups indicated the relationships among the three variables as distinctive. The results showed that syntactic knowledge had a predictive power for reading performance in the high reading group, but vocabulary had the same quality in the intermediate reading group. For the low reading group, neither vocabulary nor grammar could significantly account for the L2 reading variance. Theoretical implications and directions for further studies are discussed.

This study attempted to investigate the relative contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension ability. With 44 EFL adult learners whose language proficiency fell within the low-intermediate level, three different measures were conducted: vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were measured by researcher-developed tests and L2 reading comprehension was measured using the reading section of the TOEIC test. In order to examine the two predicting variables (i.e., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) a multiple regression analysis was performed. The study found that both grammatical and vocabulary knowledge related significantly to L2 reading comprehension. Additionally, vocabulary knowledge showed a slightly stronger contribution to reading comprehension than syntactic knowledge. These findings suggest that it is equally important for lower level readers to understand vocabulary as well as basic syntactic rules and structures when it comes to EFL reading comprehension.

This study examined the effects of teaching contextual inference and word association strategies on 5th grade elementary school students' vocabulary knowledge development. A total of 56 students participated in the current study, as divided into either the contextual inference group or the word association group. The vocabulary proficiency levels of the participants were also considered and the students in each group were further divided into either the upper level group or the lower level group. The participants experienced six treatment sessions, and in each session they had to study five vocabulary items using each of the two vocabulary learning strategies. The posttest and delayed posttest results indicated that both strategies were effective for the vocabulary knowledge development of the upper level group as well as the lower level group. Some possible implications for elementary school English classrooms in Korea are discussed.

This article reports on a study that compared EFL freshman university students’receptive and productive recall vocabulary knowledge and their ability to use that knowledge, as it remains unclear in the literature to what extent knowledge of vocabulary, especially productive knowledge, is indicative of learners’ ability to use vocabulary to communicate. The study first measured the vocabulary size of 169students from 24 majors. Next, deeper meaning word knowledge and vocabulary userelated knowledge were assessed by administering depth tests to 51 of the students who completed the size tests. The study found that the participants were able to use only 60.3% of the words that were known receptively and productively on the size tests, and that receptive deeper meaning vocabulary knowledge was 43.0% greater than productive knowledge. Finally, the study results support the concept of a vocabulary knowledge continuum, but highlight the importance of including both receptive and productive knowledge, as they were found to develop in a dissimilar manner.

This study examined whether vocabulary knowledge has meaningful effects on reading comprehension of Korean high school EFL learners and investigated which specific type of vocabulary knowledge, between vocabulary breadth and depth, plays a bigger role in reading comprehension when the learners’ English language proficiency is taken into account. The participants of this study were ninety eight high school EFL learners in Seoul, Korea, and they were tested on a series of measures tapping on their reading comprehension abilities and vocabulary knowledge in two different dimensions (vocabulary breadth and depth). Their listening comprehension abilities were also measured in order to control for the effects of general oral language comprehension abilities known to be the foremost contributor to reading comprehension and thus to enable focused analysis of the role of vocabulary knowledge. The study findings revealed that 1) vocabulary knowledge itself played a critical role in predicting reading comprehension abilities even after controlling for their listening comprehension abilities and that 2) compared to vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth played a relatively more important role in predicting reading comprehension, regardless of the learners’ language proficiency. The findings provide important implications for vocabulary and reading comprehension instructions for Korean EFL students.

Lexical knowledge is an important predictor of second language learning. The present study focuses on aspects of lexical knowledge of Korean elementary (6'h grade) and middle school learners (9'h grade) in connection to learni ng strategies, that is, with regard to vocabulary learning and by investigating the learners' preferred English medium of interest. The learners were asked to complete questionnaires for information on vocabu lary learni ng strategies, and were tested with receptive and prod uctive vocabulalY levels test to assess their vocabulary knowledge. One-way ANOVA was conducted to note differences between the different vocabulary learning strategy groups, and multiple regression was employed to select predictors of learners' receptive and vocabulary knowledge. While the learners did not favor public education (school lessons), private lessons indicated to be the dominant means of learning English among the 6th graders with larger vocabu lalY sizes; the use of the vocabu lary workbook indicated to be a useful resource for the 9th graders. Although movies were popularly viewed by most of the learners, it was tile learners who had been reading books in Engli sh that seemed t.o have obtained larger vocabulary sizes. The findings provide guidelines for vocabulalY instruction in Korean elementary and middle school contexts .

Limited research on the PYLT (productive Vocabulary Levels Test) stimu lated the investigation into the relationship between the PYLT and Korean col lege students' productive vocabulary use in writing. For the purpose of the study, twenty five students (n=25) were asked to take the PVLT, perform translation tasks, and write an essay. They were also asked to write a reflection paper to examine their perceptions of the PVLT. The LFP (Lexical Frequency Profile) was employed to analyze the students' compositions to examine the relationships between their vocabulalY profiles and the PVLT. The results of the study indicated that there was no significant correlation between the PYLT and the LFP; the relationships between the PVLT and other variables were largely influenced by word frequency levels. These findings imply that the PVLT at the 2000 word frequency level represents the students' vocabulary knowledge in their compositions, and their writing proficiency. As for the perceptions of the PYLT, most of the students responded that the PVLT assessed their vocabulalY knowledge. Interestingly, they attributed both success and failure in providing correct answers to the test format of the PVL T. This study suggests that interpretation of the results of the PYLT should be associated with word frequency levels.

This study investigated the relations among Korean phonological processing skills, English vocabulary knowledge, and the learning of new English words in 6th grade children. The children were tested in phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, and naming speed tasks, as well as English vocabulary and paired-associate learning of Korean-English word pairs. Most tasks were significantly correlated with English vocabulary and paired-associate learning. In regression analyses, phonological awareness, short-term memory, and naming speed significantly predicted English vocabulary; and English vocabulary and naming speed predicted paired-associate learning. These results suggest that Korean phonological awareness, naming speed, and short-term memory are associated with English vocabulary knowledge and learning. These findings support the transfer of phonological processing skills across second languages.